I - BioMedical Sciences & Engineering

On February 19th, the birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, Professor James G. Fujimoto was awarded the Honorary Doctorate Degree at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. Professor Fujimoto was awarded the University’s highest academic distinction, Doctor Honoris Causa. Read more.

Mapping the human genome, accomplished a decade ago, was heralded for laying the foundation for understanding genetic variation and links to a wide range of diseases. But genes can be switched on and off by many chemical modifications, aka "epigenetic marks." Now Manolis Kellis, EECS professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Broad Institute has led an NIH group that has created a similar map of the human epigenome. This work will lead to a global map towards understanding fundamental developmental and disease processes in humans. Read more.

Our susceptibility to disease depends both on the genes that we inherit from our parents and on our lifetime experiences. These two components — nature and nurture — seem to affect very different processes in the context of Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. Read more.

In 2008, the World Health Organization announced a global effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about 800,000 people every year. As part of that goal, scientists are trying to develop new drugs that target the malaria parasite during the stage when it infects the human liver — crucial because some strains of malaria can lie dormant in the liver for several years before flaring up. Read more.

Five members of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of a total of eight MIT faculty have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering including Hari Balakrishnan, Sangeeta Bhatia, Anantha Chandrakasan, L. Rafael Reif and Daniela Rus. Read more.

Madrid-MIT M+Visión Team wins 2015 Singapore Challenge. Luca Giancardo, PhD and the neuroQWERTY team awarded $100,000 for the best proposal to help elderly to “Age in Place” with their technology. Read more.

Professor Joel Voldman, working with EECS graduate student Burak Dura and others from Whitehead Institute and Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new device that allows scientists to follow communication between immune cells. The work, reported in the Jan. 13 issue of Nature Communications, may lead to future studies of mechanisms that involve cancer and other diseases. Read more.

CSAIL postdoc and member of the MIT Computational Biology Group, Andreas Pfenning and collaborators at Duke University have reported findings on large data studies comparing song bird genomics with humans and primates. Vocal-learning birds and primates have common genes that could help pinpoint genetic disorders in humans such as stuttering or Huntington's Disease. Read more.

EECS professor Ron Weiss has teamed with Mechanical Engineering professor Domitilla Del Vecchio and students from multiple departments at MIT to create a device that allows large biological circuits that behave with predictability nearly like that of electronic circuits. The work published this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology, has many applications -- particularly biosensing. Read more.